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Carly Slade | Episode 943
Carly Slade grew up in “Big sky” Alberta, Canada. Carly’s work is influenced by her blue-collar roots and plagued by a concern for the precarious nature of the working class. Using a mix of materials (most often including clay, embroidery, and building supplies), Carly creates dioramas of real places in an unreal perspective. Carly received her MFA from San Jose State University and her BFA from the Alberta University of the Arts. Carly is currently an Assistant Professor and Area Head at California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt, in Arcata, CA, USA.
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You mentioned that you were in construction. What kind of trade were you working in?
So I kind of did a couple of things, in undergrad I worked for a company doing residential gas line moves. That was sweet work, six tens, so six days a week, ten hours a day. I started out painting the pipe and then I was a fuser and then I did the polyethylene pipe connection. And then I did a little bit of carpentry in the middle and then I co-owned a concrete shop. We did concrete countertops, vanities, wall panels, and furniture. I ended up selling my portion of the company to go to grad school.
Is your connection to construction the informative portion of your work?
Yeah, 100 percent. And I often imagine myself as a giant, like laying a tiny foundation for a building and putting up tiny walls and I slab build and I think about slabs of clay as sheets of wood . These things are done in painstaking, time consuming ways to kind of honor and reference the trades person.
What were the challenges of women working in the trades that you had to face?
I think not being taken seriously would be the umbrella term, you know, I found that I had to work four times as hard just so that people thought that I deserved a place there. And then sexual harassment obviously. Whether it’s from guys I worked with or the public I would interact with, inappropriate comments, creepy dudes, but I also had a lot of really fantastic coworkers that have my back in a lot of those situations.
Have you seen that same kind of challenge in the ceramic world also?
You know it’s interesting because I have chosen these two fields where historically women have been underrepresented and in a lot of ways I feel more comfortable still on a construction site than I do within academia. The program I am running now has a 50 or 60 year history and I am the first woman who has ever ran it. So there is definitely this kind of lineage of men being in charge of things even though women for years have made up the highest majority of students. I definitely think ceramics has a history of that but we are getting a lot better.
What is your favorite tool?
Can I have two?
Sure! go ahead!
So a Dolan knife, obviously. And it was given to me by my undergrad professor when I went there a did a demo. So that is just emotional and lovely. And then the Dirty Girls bevel tools. I went home and my dad helped me mod them So that I can make them all different angles. So those are probably my can’t live without them.
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Instagram: @carlyslade